Is Your Website Mobile Friendly and Speed Tested?

Google is now policing websites and is planning on changing ranking algorithms to include mobile friendly testing/grading and load speed testing. I get it. Since we’re moving into an age where over 1/2 of web searches are being done on SmartPhones. With this, Google wants to serve up the best sites for matching the results that you’re looking for but they also want your experience to be better when you click through on a search result for the user.

So this is going to add to the ‘white hat’ things that you need to do to improve your website. I will tell you that I’ve tried launching some of the fixes that Google recommends to speed up your site or make it more mobile friendly – and to be frank, it can be tough as hell.

Reno Chiropractor website is not inherently Google Compliant.

This seems to be more of an issue (to do the fixes) if you’re running a WordPress blog and theme to manage your website. I tried Google Speed Test and was terrified with the results. Not only were my sites failing, but the fixes require you to use multiple WordPress plugins to fix the issues. I tried it with our Reno Chiropractor website and as we did the patches by adding a variety of plugins. the plugins started to interfere with each other and the speed started to get drastically worse.

I’m not sure if anyone is going to be able to make headway with this and I’d hate to have to go back to the days of hand coding web pages. Maybe we’ll get lucky and some genius will figure a way to make WordPress sites and WordPress templates inherently Google Speed compliant.

So, as you can see in the picture above, the Reno Chiropractor site is not very compliant. Rather than botch it all up, let me show you the results of another site that was using the same WordPress theme, but I added the plugins to make it compliant. Notice that even though the patches are applied and all the recommended fixes are done – Google still gives it a 76 out of 100. Blech!

These results include things like slow server response time and need for server compression. Well, I painstakingly applied the patches to try to fix those things and still have dismal results.

This frightens me because if Google is going to start to degrade your search ranking by these kinds of factors – we as site owners will have a new and tougher set of issues to deal with.